Senator Jim DeMint, the president-elect of The Heritage Foundation, apparently has a crystal ball. This morning he predicted that Obama would use the sequester as a smokescreen:

So why is President Obama leading a scare campaign filled with untruths about how sequestration will necessitate firing firefighters, cops, and teachers?

I’ll tell you why. Because liberals know the Obama tax hikes forced through in January will really hurt the economy. It’s preemptive damage control. The President is trying to blame the sequester for the economic problems his tax hikes will spawn.

So every time that we get a piece of economic news over the next month, next two months, next six months, as long as the sequester’s in place, we’ll know that that economic news could have been better if Congress had not failed to act.

But no matter what the President says, the economy is not hobbled from the sequester, DeMint wrote:

Our struggling economy is the President’s own creation. His tax hikes—in income taxes, payroll taxes, and Obamacare taxes—will take $150 billion out of the economy this year alone. The $150 billion doesn’t magically appear in Washington’s bank account without real consequences. It comes out of your paycheck. It means less money for your boss to give you a raise.

In fact, DeMint said, the “impact of the tax hikes on the economy is nearly twice as big as the impact of sequestration.”

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